The man who analyzed the role of Fay Wray and others who became the “girl in the hairy paw” of King Kong has died.

Ronald Gottesman, 77, a retired University of Southern California English professor, who co-edited the “Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volumes I and II” published in 1979, died May 10, 2010, at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center of complications from pneumonia, USC announced. He taught American literature and American studies at USC from 1975 to 2001. As a scholar of film studies, he wrote of the work of Orson Welles and of movie depictions of King Kong in The Girl in the Hairy Paw. He also penned the significant study, Violence in America: An Encyclopedia.

Gottesman was born January 7, 1933, in Boston. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts, a master’s degree from Colgate University and a doctorate from Indiana University, all in English. He served in the Army Reserve and taught at Northwestern, Indiana, Rutgers and Wisconsin Parkside before arriving at USC.

He was founding director of USC’s Center for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary study group for public policy that ended in 1984.

About Loren ColemanLoren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.